Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

I Didn’t Think this Would Make it Through the Senate From the NYT, among others: “Republicans Woo Moderates on Tax Cut“. It looks like the Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate, with Dick Cheney holding the tie-breaking 51st, for an amendment to replace the Grassley-proposed and Senate Finance Committee approved version of the dividend […]

More Jayson Blair Eric Boehlert of Salon has a story devoted to the race angle. One quote from Jim Dwyer, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times” struck me as interesting: …”I’ve worked at six newspapers and seen alcoholic shipwrecks and drug shipwrecks, and people who’ve fallen apart through nervous breakdowns, and they’re all brought […]

The 25th Ammendment… …can be read here. Basically, the President gets to comeback when he says he’s ready, and it takes a majority of the cabinet to initiate a Congressional vote to prevent the President’s return. Should that occur, it takes a 2/3 majority of both houses to prevent the President from returning to office […]

Jayson Blair Update The Washington Post has a opinion piece on Jayson Blair, by Terry Neal. Apparently, I should have included Ruth Shalit in my list of noted plagiarizers who were not beneficiaries of any affirmative action programs. I like Neal’s take on why Blair, and other plagiarizers, do so well (until they are caught): […]

No to Tax Cuts Debt Increases Matt Stoller has what I think is a pretty good suggestion. And it’s much more accurate than, for example, calling the “estate tax” the “death tax” (only a small proportion of those who die are subject to estate taxes). AB

The Battle is Won No, sadly not the War on Terrorism, just AB’s battle against the Axis of Frustration (Blogger, Templates, HTML) and its weapons of extreme annoyance: style sheets, screen resolution, table width and placement, TR and TD, valign,…. Unless I’m crazy, Angry Bear is now viewable without horizontal scrolling in resolutions from 800×600 […]

Affirmative Action CalPundit has a post that largely echoes a conversation I had last night on the subject of whether Affirmative Action leads to promotion and hiring of less qualified people. I said, “sure, you can find instances of it, but you can find instances of hirings of unqualified people for a variety of reasons”. […]

Browser Stats For all of you using Netscape v X.x, I assume you are doing so out of some sort of MS protest, or love of the concept of Mozilla. In practice, Mozilla worked out rather poorly; I say, use Opera. When pages let me use it, it’s really the best browser around, in my […]

Hey, Angry Bear, Why are you so Angry? Generally, I’m not, but right now I can’t get this #!@!#@! blog to fit into the correct width. So tomorrow (when I have broadband access) I have to redo the template. Until then it looks like you have use the horizontal scroll bar. Just to really make […]

Wax On Via Martin Stabe, a link to another Waxman ProductionTM, this one a report on how much Bush and members of his cabinet stand to gain if the Dividend tax is repealed, from which I extracted this table (click here for a larger graph): For those still unclear on the concept, add a line […]